Stories

and we cling to our stories
like leeches
sucking out
every ounce of life,
to live and outlive
the lies we tell ourselves,
the warm blankets we need
on cold, dark nights,
the fires that we light
over and over again
with different travellers
each time,
conversation starters
and sometimes enders,
avatars we incarnate into,
to become the gods
we already are,
even without them;

yes, of course
we need our stories,
to sing our songs,
to dance, to rise,
to fall, to chime in,
to let out
our long-trapped voices
in cracks of stone;

but let's not be bound
by those chains
that slit our wrists,
let's not breathe
their stale, heavy air,
let's not make them
our flesh and bones;
let them live
in the warmth of our skin,
until it's time
to shed their outlived lives,
let's celebrate their death
like the skin of happy bubbles
popping every now and then;
for they are not raging gods
and goddesses
out of incredible myths;
they are but specks of dust
gathering together,
to dance awhile
in a slanting sunbeam
resting upon
the dark
of another unborn morn.

In the Blue of the Flame

I don't want
to sit around
or sing and dance
and tell stories
around a sacred fire,

I want to stand
in the blue
of the flame -
naked,
groundless,
yet alive,

tempered by
an unquenchable longing
to meet myself
in my fiery wholeness,
reclaiming the majesty
and insignificance
of what I am
and what I'm here to do,
in a world that's content
to share stories around a fire,
too terrified to burn
its fingers and toes.

The Book of Your Life

there is a joy
when I pick up
the book of your life
and open it
to read a page
in silent reverie,
where words
become stories,
where spaces
become pauses,
where memories
become new arrivals,
crying out to be held
against the softness
of my palms,
where lines
become the web
of our one entangled,
sacred existence.

Ardhanari

I walked down
the same stairs
you walked that night
into sweet oblivion,
red and white
draped over
the teeming brown,
a quiet readying-
not for a fight,
but to give
and receive you
through the sacred fire
that I walked through,
with you

and I walked that day
like never before,
a majestic stillness
draping me, carrying me
through dead voices
trapped in coffins -
those redundant stories
of right and wrong,
flimsy threads
that just couldn't hold
new chants, new songs
coming alive

voices drowned forever
in the visionary anger
that cleansed my sight
in one instant;
who was I, you asked,
too scared to shout,
and I walked on
as if in a trance;
silent mudras
of sight and sound,
dancing, whirling
in an explosion of light

swallowing forms
familiar and strange,
where man and woman
fused seamlessly
into one,
drawing the nameless
in the pupils of eyes
and warm cells of a heart
still being formed.

Sky and Water

 Sky and Water

and when I looked into
the space between,
the silence,
the emptiness,
the infiniteness,
where nothing seems
or has ever seemed
out of place,
I think of two friends –
Sky and Water
who are together, yet apart,
changeless, and yet changed
as they follow their course
and mirror their stories
in the space between

and beyond.

Prayer Flags

the cold wind
stings and bites
into half-dead skin
ready now
to be shed
and blessed;
scars and wounds,
some healed, or
not healed -
chants of private grief,
framed in eternity.

memories and dreams
tied to
unwavering trees,
stories of pain
and longing
left untold still,
like silent prayer flags
dancing and riding
on the breath
of a fanning,
folding wind.